Looking for Betty MacDonald: The Egg, the Plague, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, and I

by Paula Becker

  Although it is only ten miles from quaint Carmel-by-the-Sea, with its fairytale cottages and breathtaking views, Carmel Valley feels like a completely different place. The Carmel River, for most of the year just a trickle, is its dominant aquatic feature: the Pacific Ocean—in truth so near—feels distant. Carmel Valley is much more businesslike—drier in every way—than Carmel-by-the-Sea, Seattle, or Vashon.

  The ranch was at the top of the Los Laureles grade, a winding, white-knuckle drive. “I am an excellent driver but Don still leaps four feet in the air whenever we encounter another car—is pure white and dripping sweat all the way down the Los Laureles grade and has almost poked holes through the floorboards of both cars,” Betty complained to Mary.1 It was a road she learned to drive alone, at night.

  On Vashon, Betty’s family both inspired her work and hindered it. Carmel Valley had fewer distractions, but Betty still felt stymied. Many writers made ends meet with work for periodicals: humorous articles in monthly magazines yielded quick cash and were less taxing than producing books. But despite Bernice Baumgarten’s encouragement, Betty never produced more than a handful of articles. Her money troubles persisted once she’d moved to Carmel Valley full time, but Don’s presence meant that at least she was not wrestling them alone.

  One impediment to Betty’s writing, despite having more opportunity, was that she had developed a terrible skin condition, a persistent, exhausting, and nearly dementing itch. When it was at its most severe, Betty spent hours in the bath, hoping that the water would soothe her skin. She visited allergists and even tried self-hypnosis. Nothing helped for very long.

  Some doctors told her the itching was psychosomatic. Betty regarded this diagnosis as shameful, seldom mentioning the itching in letters to her family. Even Bernice Baumgarten knew nothing of her condition, although it drained Betty of the will and stamina to write. When the itching flared up, it made her a patient once more, this time a needy one.

  The itching and the move to the isolated Carmel Valley property began Betty’s subtle withdrawal, at age forty-eight, from the public stage. When Egg was published, her ordinary life had opened wide to admit the nation and then the world. After the move, Betty was largely silent in the public sphere, apart from the few weeks of publicity for Onions in the Stew.

  As wrenching as it was to leave her daughters and grandchildren, Betty was relieved to finally settle on the property she’d come to love. During the three years she’d spent living on Vashon without Don, commuting to Carmel Valley only for brief visits, she’d felt the contrast between the two places strongly. Vashon was beautiful, but gray and wet, and bleak without Don. She had come to long for the golden-brown Carmel Valley hills, the sweeping views from the top of the ranch, and her husband’s company.

  Betty and Don planned to build a large house at Corral de Tierra as soon as they sold their Washington properties. In 1955, in desperation, they finally rented out the Vashon house. Because the sale of the Howe Street house alone was not enough to finance construction on the ranch, Betty and Don made do with the small existing house on the property.2

  A more pressing problem was that the ranch was short of water, which Betty and Don needed to support a commercial cattle business. Buying a cattle ranch without investigating its water sources was a rookie mistake. The property had two wells and two springs, but these were far from the house and often ran dry. In summer, providing drinking water for the cattle took precedence over bathing and watering the garden. Betty and Don hired a dowser and dug several wells following his instructions, but to no avail.

  The Carmel Valley’s natural beauty is legendary. John Steinbeck’s first collection of short stories, The Pastures of Heaven, was set in a landscape that included Betty’s large property. Even when she was itching or feeling guilty about not writing or worried about the lack of water and dwindling funds, she drew comfort from the overwhelming natural beauty around her.

  Betty wrote of her love of the place to friends and family: “Don is happier than I have ever known him—he gets up at 6 or 6:30 every single morning no matter how late we have been out and he eats, breathes, and sleeps the ranch—he is very brown and very handsome and very sweet—I just absolutely adore it here and never want to live any place else,” she wrote to Joan and Jerry. “Everybody is very proud of me down here and act like I’m terribly famous—already they have all my books in both bookstores.3

  New friends kept Don and Betty busy. “Almost everybody down here is a good cook,” Betty told Joan. “Almost everybody is poor and almost everybody is intellectual—everybody entertains very easily and [in] Margar [Sydney] fashion—lots of dust under the bed but beautiful flower arrangements, wonderful food and darling people.”4

  In Carmel Valley, Betty finally found neighbors who shared her literary and artistic interests. This was a relief, but it did not spare her new friends from sometimes being derided as phonies in Betty’s letters. Betty and Don were invited to parties at the Del Monte Country Club, although Betty, a staunch Democrat, complained about fraternizing with so many Republicans. Don joined the Carmel Valley Horsemen’s Association, participating in roundups throughout the valley and hosting barbecues, with Betty, for the members who helped with the MacDonalds’ roundups at Corral de Tierra.

  Once she was settled, Betty began working through the fan mail backlog the move had caused, using a form response: “Thank you for your friendly letter which I intended to answer long ago. However, when we moved to California, all my mail was lost and we finally found it among the 387,654,382 boxes in the barn.”5

  Betty was a prolific letter writer, and her missives to family members multiplied once she lived in Carmel Valley. She saved up correspondence and then spent a day tackling replies. When writing to her family, Betty frequently pitted one story against another, choosing sides to suit the relative she was writing to. She could be catty, even lacerating, when writing about one family member to another, and then she would reverse the skewering when writing to the family member the previous letter had skewered.

  Betty had always insisted that her children and then grandchildren call her “Betty,” never Mother, Grandmother, or any other nickname, but when she wrote to Anne and Joan from the ranch, she sometimes signed her letters “Maugham.”6 This was an inside joke, a reference to Somerset Maugham (a favorite writer), but it is interesting that finally, in her late forties, Betty was willing to use the maternal moniker, even if only as a pun. Betty occasionally signed letters to her grandchildren “BeNana MacDonald,” appending a scrawled “Betty.”7

  Back in Seattle, Mary’s domestic life was changing too. Her girls were still at home but nearly grown. The house in the Madrona neighborhood where Jens and Mary had raised their daughters was too large for just two people. Looking ahead, Mary and Jens purchased a piece of land on Vashon and, with Cleve’s assistance, began building a year-round beach house. Real-estate agents ferried large families through the Jensens’ Madrona home, which Mary and Jens needed to sell before they could move to Vashon.

  In Carmel Valley, Betty struggled with her persistent itching problem, Sydney (who was becoming increasingly infirm), ranch hands, and Don. Despite her initial bliss at being back with Don full time, as time went by Betty became increasingly frustrated with him. He was “Bishopy,” she wrote to several family members, by which (her opinion of the Chimacum family not having been improved by her courtroom confrontation with them) she meant ornery or lazy.

  She also felt underappreciated by Sydney, who had lived with Betty and Don almost continuously since their marriage, visiting her other children for a week or a month, usually when child care was needed. Sydney’s grandchildren—who called her either Grandmother or Margar—remember her as a quiet presence. She traveled light, carrying little more than a book, some clothes, her art supplies, and her ubiquitous Camel cigarettes. Once Betty was established at the ranch, Sydney was with her constantly.

  An avid gardener, Sydney mourned the loss of the lush plantings she and Betty had c
reated around the Vashon house. The hot and arid climate made the ranch a difficult place to cultivate plants. By the time she and Betty moved to the ranch, Sydney’s health was poor, her heart weakened by decades of heavy smoking, and she could do little gardening work. Perhaps as a result, Sydney grew crotchety with Betty and Don.

  Betty vented her frustrations to Mary, the only family member she felt would understand, in long, sad letters, apologizing for their dullness and thanking her sister for providing empathy. For her part, Mary was sometimes exasperated by the needs and demands of her three teenagers. “Every time anybody is mean to you, you come up here and every time anybody is mean to me I’ll come down there and pretty soon we’ll both be so mad we’ll have a little house half way in between and never go home anymore,” Mary suggested in a letter.8

  Although Betty continued slowly to work at the stories that would become Hello, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, itching often rendered her unable to force herself to the typewriter. Her daily reminder book noted cattle roundups, visits from family members, and doctors’ appointments. She could envision a book about the ranch, though: Betty decided that she was going to call it Too Old to Ride and that the theme would be her relationship with the beautiful sorrel horse she’d recently acquired. His mane, she felt, was just the color of her hair. Bernice Baumgarten was pleased when she caught wind of this idea and encouraged Betty to get started.

  Before she could outline the new book, Betty prepared a speech she’d agreed to deliver to a convention of insurance agents in Enumclaw, near Seattle. Betty disliked public speaking and rarely accepted such requests, but this engagement was too lucrative to turn down. Money was tight, as usual: she and Don relied on royalties to meet their living expenses, and this income fluctuated. Betty had used up her most recent advance from Lippincott and was hard pressed to make mortgage payments on both the ranch and the Vashon properties.9

  During this Seattle visit, in late July 1955, Betty began hemorrhaging. Her physician feared that she might have uterine cancer. She was hospitalized and underwent curettage, but doctors found nothing of concern. She went home to Carmel Valley, returning to Seattle in autumn to stay with Anne during the final weeks of Anne’s fourth pregnancy. Betty spent afternoons with her grandchildren, gathering windfall apples and reading books, giving Anne as much chance as possible to rest.

  Whenever she was in Seattle, Betty saw her doctors. At one appointment during August 1956, Betty’s doctor diagnosed probable endometriosis and scheduled surgery. This operation revealed ovarian cancer that had spread and was felt to be inoperable. Betty’s doctors told her family that they thought Betty might die within just a few weeks. At Don’s insistence, Betty was not given the news for ten days after the surgery.

  Despite this grim prognosis, she recovered from the surgery and was discharged from the hospital. Betty recuperated at Mary’s house and underwent eight weeks of radiation therapy. She then decided to return to the ranch.

  Through Mary’s staunch advocacy and Jens’s connections, Betty seems to have received better medical care in Seattle than in Carmel Valley, where she frequently felt dismissed by doctors. “For five years I have been going from doctor to doctor because I itched and was tired and they all told me it was psychosomatic,” Betty wrote to her dear friend Goddard Lieberson, now president of Columbia Broadcasting. “Creative people are all neurotic you know—of course now they say it was the cancer producing a foreign protein that made me itch.”10

  Resting in Carmel Valley, Betty wrote to Bernice Baumgarten that she was still very tired but feeling stronger. “Don is a saint—waits on me hand and foot and is so patient with my depressions which I must say I do have—try as hard as I can not to—I still can’t see the good of telling a person they have cancer—I would have been so happy with endometriosis or whatever it was and I’m not sure I’m enough of a Pollyanna to go whistling through life with a huge axe on the back of my neck.”11

  As Betty struggled with the implications of her diagnosis, Sydney’s health steadily declined. She suffered several heart attacks and by late 1956 was largely bedridden. Against all odds, Betty managed to fly her mother to Seattle in December 1956 to see family. Because Sydney required a wheelchair, she and Betty navigated the flights from Monterey to San Francisco to Seattle and back with much tipping of redcap porters.

  Sydney’s declining health made her increasingly physically dependent on her daughter. She also grew less tolerant and more critical when details such as Don’s coffee-making skills or Betty’s plans for the day failed to live up to her expectations. She needed ferrying to doctor appointments, and during her frequent hospitalizations it fell to Betty to manage her mother’s care and keep her company. If she and Don and Sydney had still lived in Seattle, Betty’s sisters would have helped with these details, but they were far away.

  Betty and Sydney were both ill for much of early 1957, and Sydney was hospitalized several times. As she had promised her Seattle doctors, Betty saw doctors in California so that her health could be monitored. “I’ll let you know what the cancer specialist says,” she wrote Bernice Baumgarten. “I think they are all a little irked with me for not dying—[and] so upsetting their prognosis.”12 She owed Lippincott a fifth Piggle-Wiggle book and tried to summon the energy to get that project going.13

  The beauty of the garden and the ranch gave Betty great pleasure, and going on walks helped her regain her strength. “My delphiniums are taller than the house and all in bloom—my cineraria are all in bloom also the gerbera, the camellias, rhododendrons, violas, freesias, lupines, daisies, roses, clematis, ranunculus, primroses, and orange and lemon trees,” she wrote to Anne in April 1957.14 Walking two miles down to the spring near the boundary of their property in the valley, she reported, “Both sides of the road are massed with California lilac—it ranges from pure white to almost navy blue—wild gooseberry which looks like fuchsia—blooming sage, chaparral which has pale pink blossoms and some kind of bush with bright yellow blossoms—the roadway [is] carpeted in wild forgetmenots white and blue. . . . All the hills are shades of olive green, from very pale to almost black—millions of birds were singing and the sky was pale blue without a single cloud.”15

  Mary visited the ranch for three weeks that spring. The sisters cooked and laughed together, and Mary observed that the marital tensions she had long perceived between Don and Betty seemed to have evaporated. Although no fan of Don, Mary forced herself to try to see him through Betty’s eyes, which kept things pleasant. The sisters roamed through fields of wildflowers, remembering their childhood.16 They concentrated on their love for one another and ignored anything disturbing: Sydney’s illness, Betty’s constant itching and need for medication, the knowledge that Don and Betty’s financial troubles might prove insurmountable. But under all of this, Mary noted, Betty was trying to hide her fear.

  All her life, Mary had directed and encouraged her sister, turning Betty away from worry and toward productive action. She did the same on this visit, which Mary must have suspected might be the last normal time they spent together, and encouraged Betty to get started on Too Old to Ride. “Mary thinks I should write my ranch book right away,” Betty wrote Lippincott editor George Stevens. “It does seem to me that there is a tremendous need right now for a funny book so I’m going to try and do the outline next week—I am also started on my Piggle-Wiggle—Bernice will faint. Mary is really wonderful for me—she is so practical and doesn’t hold with any temperament.”17

  Betty confided to Margaret Bundy Callahan that she was five thousand dollars in debt to Lippincott because of their advance on the fifth Piggle-Wiggle book, and she was struggling to finish the outline of the ranch memoir so that she could secure a twenty-five-thousand-dollar advance on that book. “Since I’ve had cancer Lippincott wants a doctor’s guarantee that I won’t die before completion of the book—loyal old pals that they are—I’m certainly going to have to type faster than I’ve been doing,” she wrote darkly.18

  Betty’s itching continue
d, along with what she believed to be gallbladder attacks that left her depressed and exhausted. She was consuming no animal fat and taking atropine and Epsom salts before every meal in attempt to alleviate her symptoms. After suffering through a bad backache for over a month, Betty visited her gynecologist, who told her that the tumor they were keeping an eye on was very small and that judging by her general health, she was fine. “The doctors in Seattle are certainly one billion percent better than any I have seen down here,” she wrote to Mary.19 The Carmel doctor, although he knew she had cancer, barely examined her, she added.

  Anne and her family visited in late June 1957. “Dinner in Loli’s back yard—danced Calypso,” Betty’s reminder book noted. Loli Wilcox and her husband George, an architect, were among Betty’s closest Carmel Valley friends. The weather was blisteringly hot. Betty and Anne shopped in Carmel Village and took the children to the beach.

  On August 16, 1957, Sydney Bard died of heart disease in the hospital in Monterey. News of her death went out on the Associated Press wire service and was reported in Seattle and by the Montana Standard. As Betty MacDonald’s mother, she had been famous.

  “Sydney died Friday afternoon,” Betty wrote Goddard Lieberson. “I went to see her five minutes before she died and she was sitting up in bed reading the Saturday Evening Post and complaining about the hideous maroon, peach and Kelly green décor of the room at the hospital—she had been in bed or in the hospital most of the past year and had grown frailer and frailer physically but sharper and sharper mentally—she wasn’t at all deaf, still read a book a day and all magazines published but she had almost given up smoking.”20